This talk considers two reconceptions of communist politics emerging in response to the so-called “crisis of Marxism” of the 1970s. Théorie Communiste’s “theory of the gap” elaborates the paradox whereby the proletariat’s struggle to reproduce itself in and against capital converges with the abolition of itself and capital, which it co-constitutes. For Alain Badiou, communist politics proceeds by breaking with the political inscription of social relation(s). Proletarian dis-identification constitutes communism as a politics of unbinding. These two dialectics—of contradiction and subtraction respectively—give rise to two different and antagonistic versions of communist politics.

Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan 2007). He is currently working on a book entitled Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality after Marx.

Moderated by: Ozren Pupovac